what I like most aren’t the easy things, but rather the reward that something difficult has become comprehensible.

Gallup was a pioneer in what some now call “applied anthropology,”53 the use of anthropology to solve a practical human problem.

it’s ravishing to read an essay that explores an idea you’ve already decided is correct, and a great narrative that upholds your theory of the world feels good to share with friends.

uncommon excitement precedes uncommon sales,

The economics of highbrow media, or any “good for you” business, often requires monetizing aspiration rather than actual behavior.

Success in an attention-seeking industry requires a business model that acknowledges that attention, like the weather, is inherently unpredictable.

There is an old Japanese term that perfectly sums up this surfeit of content: “tsundoku.” It means the piling up of unread books. In the twenty-first century, we all live in the shadow of an enormous multimedia tsundoku.

Facebook has stressed that it is a neutral platform to facilitate the transmission of any communication. But this seems insufficient, since the very idea of a neutral platform governed by a human-designed algorithm is fundamentally flawed and possibly paradoxical. The Facebook algorithm is not a divine expression of audience preferences. It is,

The elite do not just like opera because they have been exposed to it; they are exposed to opera because they think it makes them elite.